{"id":138559,"date":"2019-08-07T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=138559"},"modified":"2019-08-08T16:25:56","modified_gmt":"2019-08-08T20:25:56","slug":"please-fire-jia-tolentino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/08\/07\/please-fire-jia-tolentino\/","title":{"rendered":"Please Fire Jia Tolentino"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Jia Tolentino. Photo: \u00a9 Elena Mudd.<\/p><\/div>\n

Is there any topic Jia Tolentino can\u2019t tackle? Since becoming a staff writer for <\/em>The New Yorker in 2016, she\u2019s written features about the electronic cigarette brand Juul<\/a> and the culty athleisure company Outdoor Voices<\/a>; commentaries on the disastrous Brett Kavanaugh hearings<\/a> and the violent rise of incels<\/a>; and examinations of the \u201clarge adult son\u201d meme<\/a> and the YouTube phenomenon of remixing popular songs so they sound like they\u2019re echoing in abandoned malls<\/a>. In the early years of her professional writing career, she conducted a series of funny yet deeply sympathetic interviews<\/a> with adult virgins at <\/em>The Hairpin, and her work as deputy editor at <\/em>Jezebel helped shape online feminist discourse as we now know it. She also has an M.F.A. in fiction, and the first short story<\/a> she ever submitted won <\/em>Carve magazine\u2019s Raymond Carver Contest<\/em>. \u201cIf I got fired tomorrow,\u201d she told me, \u201cI would probably go to the woods and try to write a novel.\u201d Even her tweets are good; for what it\u2019s worth, my introduction to her work came via the occasional dog photos and thoughts on music she posts, which are often the bright spots in my feed.<\/em><\/p>\n

What unites these wildly disparate threads is Tolentino herself. Although she\u2019s been called the voice of her generation, her writing is sharp, clear, and utterly her own. Tolentino\u2019s first book, <\/em>Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion<\/a>, vibrates with her presence. Over the course of nine long original essays, she turns inside out the fast-casual restaurants, pricey exercise classes, and dubiously simple narratives we use to propel ourselves through our overmediated lives. The result is a sort of revision of Joan Didion\u2019s \u201cWe tell ourselves stories in order to live\u201d for the late-capitalist horror show that is the twenty-first century.<\/em><\/p>\n

Each of the essays is dense with references and anecdotes. I came to think of them as self-contained storm systems, clouds of controlled chaos that Tolentino was conducting from somewhere far above my head. \u201cReality TV Me\u201d grapples with her time as a contestant on the forgotten television show <\/em>Girls v. Boys: Puerto Rico while also considering how the foundational myths she\u2019s built from the experience are utterly false. \u201cPure Heroines,\u201d one of the most finely argued cases for cultural representation I\u2019ve ever read, charts the tragic lives of literary heroines through the ages, including Laura Ingalls, Esther Greenwood, and Anna Karenina. \u201cEcstasy,\u201d the best essay in the book, situates itself at the exact intersection of religion, music, and drugs; it somehow encompasses everything from Tolentino\u2019s evangelical upbringing to the history of MDMA to the birth of chopped and screwed, a genre of rap music characterized by its lethargic pace, frequent skips, and otherworldly menace. As a writer, Tolentino seems allergic to the easy conclusion; many of the essays end not with a perfectly tied bow but a slow, meticulous unraveling. In the introduction to the book, she writes, \u201cIt was worthwhile, I told myself, just trying to see clearly, even if it took me years to understand what I was trying to see.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

On the eve of a small tour to commemorate the book\u2019s launch, Tolentino spoke with me over the phone about her writing process, her favorite Houston rappers, and how she maintains a healthy sense of self in the internet age.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The subtitle of the book is Reflections on Self-Delusion<\/em>. It seems that, to a certain extent, self-delusion is inescapable. What amount would you say is healthy?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

Oh, that\u2019s such a good question. First of all, there\u2019s a subtitle only because apparently you need one to show that a book isn\u2019t a novel, which I didn\u2019t know. I would much rather not have a subtitle. I think they\u2019re cheesy. I think epigraphs are really cheesy, and I think subtitles are cheesy.<\/p>\n

Identity performance itself is not something that I think is necessarily bad. I write in the book about how the internet makes us want to perform our identities in a way that\u2019s attractive to other people. It sort of systematizes and monetizes that process. And I think that wanting to please other people and wanting other people to like you, wanting to come off well, is a natural and healthy thing\u2014I think it\u2019s good<\/em> that I want my friends to like me. So some degree of self-delusion is inevitable, and there\u2019s some mechanism within it that can be good.<\/p>\n

For example, the idea that what you\u2019re doing is worthwhile\u2014I think it does require some self-delusion, especially now, to think anything we do matters. At the same time, what we do matters tremendously. Our mind gave us the ability for self-delusion for good reason. I mean, even to be a writer\u2014ugh\u2014some sort of self-delusion is completely necessary to think people need to read what I have to say. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s bad. I think it\u2019s great. Because it leads to something better than what would exist otherwise.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You talk in the introduction to the book about how writing helps you sort out who you are and how you feel. I guess I\u2019m wondering how you square that attitude with having to monetize your work. With the current internet-saturated media landscape, the lines between writers\u2019 private personalities and their public-facing personas begin to blur. How do you maintain the boundaries there?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

Asking how one handles writing when writing is monetized is sort of like asking how one handles being alive when being alive is monetized. It\u2019s not specific to writing. That being said, I didn\u2019t anticipate that my personality or my ability to communicate that personality online would be such a big part of my career. I\u2019m always thinking about what that means and what incentive it\u2019s giving me and how that might be changing me and how that might already have changed me.<\/p>\n

Ever since I was a child, I have taken pretty seamlessly and naturally to systems of self-broadcasting. For better or worse, I already had the kind of temperament that could take to it unchanged. I have some obvious, practical, commonsense things like \u201cdon\u2019t spend too much time on the internet\u201d and \u201cdon\u2019t do anything on the internet out of a sense of obligation\u201d and \u201cbe on the internet the way that you try to be in real life,\u201d which is just be normal and don\u2019t be a pain in the ass and try to have fun. I think about this stuff theoretically all the time, but in practice, it seems pretty easy. Be chill. Be chill and don\u2019t be stupid about things.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In the essay that opens the collection, \u201cThe I in the Internet,\u201d you talk about how the internet has affected writing and discourse in general. Do you think it\u2019s had any effect on how you write, personally, and how you arrive at conclusions?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to say, because I started writing on the internet, so to some degree, the internet has made it possible for me to have a career, period. If the internet wasn\u2019t the primary mechanism of discovery, I don\u2019t think I would have a job in media. Especially postrecession, I wouldn\u2019t have tried to move to New York and wait tables and get an internship. The whole thing was so daunting to me. The only way I was able to write was that I wrote for small blogs for free for a year. I was outside of New York and could live on this small grad-school fellowship, and I didn\u2019t need to live anywhere near where anything was actually happening for people to read me. The sort of general democratization of voice that\u2019s happened within the last ten years has also been a huge part of the reason I\u2019ve been able to have a career\u2014the fact that people are actively hungry for the perspectives of women and people of color. In terms of actually changing my style, though, I think maybe the internet has made me more flexible.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That flexibility is what I\u2019ve liked most about the book and also your writing in general\u2014how you\u2019re able to apply a critical but sympathetic eye to all sorts of things, and it doesn\u2019t feel like a high-low culture divide. It just feels like you\u2019re chasing whatever you\u2019re interested in.<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been lucky enough to work at places where I can do that. The cutesy high-low internet thing is a mode I\u2019m close to but have tried to avoid. There was that whole wave of, like, Here\u2019s how Derrida and The Simpsons<\/em> and whatever are related. And it\u2019s not that cute, you know? It\u2019s not that interesting. But not everything requires the same tone. We don\u2019t think about climate change the way we think about a meme\u2014or we actually do, but the tone with which these phenomena manifest in our heads is very different from thing to thing, and I think that\u2019s one great part about the internet. At Jezebel<\/em>, I could write something completely flippant, completely vulgar, totally unhinged\u2014I remember I once did a fake David Brooks column that was written from inside his own butthole, which is the exact only way I want to think about David Brooks\u2014but then there were things I felt very seriously about and I just couldn\u2019t write about them in the same way.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

And you\u2019re still able to do that kind of thing at The New Yorker<\/em>?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I mean, I can\u2019t write columns about David Brooks\u2019s butthole, per se. But yeah, totally. I love my editor there, and if I\u2019m super interested in something, for the most part, he says yes.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How did you decide what would be a book essay and what would be a magazine essay?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

None of the things I wrote for the book were things I had considered trying to write for The New Yorker<\/em> because these were things that I wanted to write exactly the way I wanted. I wanted the essays to be five to seven thousand words each\u2014they ended up being around ten thousand\u2014but I knew I wanted to write essays that were a little too long, that were coming at things from all these different angles. And none of them would make sense at all as New Yorker <\/em>pieces, really. \u201cEcstasy,\u201d the excerpt they ran, was probably the closest.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I find each essay remarkable in the way it weaves together all sorts of disparate references and sources. How did you go about writing and organizing such long pieces? Did you write them straight through?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

Before I sold the book, I knew the question I wanted to ask in each essay, and I knew how I would go about trying to answer it, so I had a pretty clear sense of the kind of research I\u2019d need to do. Each one had a different shape while writing it. I think the essay on optimization, \u201cAlways Be Optimizing,\u201d took me about four weeks to write the first section, and then once I did, I wrote the rest of it more seamlessly. Other ones I wrote all the way through or in one slow, long first draft and then did a full second pass, full third. But with every single essay I had a question, and then I read everything I possibly could to figure out how to answer that question, or if I could answer that question at all. I knew I was done with each essay when I felt like I had gotten somewhere new. I rely a lot on the feeling that something\u2019s been shifted. Like there\u2019s a little more air or a little more solidity or whatever, the feeling that writing has done something to the subject in my head.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That goes with what you\u2019ve said about writing in order to understand something. You\u2019ve pushed through it, and it\u2019s not necessarily that you\u2019ve reached an answer but that something has changed.<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

Yeah, exactly.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I also was curious, as I always am with collections, about sequencing. The book is structured so that each essay builds on the previous one.<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I\u2019m glad it feels like that. I had no idea how it would be structured, but I did know that the first one would probably be either \u201cThe I in Internet\u201d or \u201cReality TV Me,\u201d because I think those essays most clearly set up the issue of identity performance that cuts through the entire book. I think \u201cEcstasy\u201d is the best one, so I thought about putting that first. But it\u2019s too intense to go first, so I scrapped the idea. \u201cI Thee Dread,\u201d the weddings one, was the last essay I wrote. It was the one I feel most uncertain about as a subject and as an essay, and I was like, Okay, that should go last because the whole point of this book is that sometimes understanding things doesn\u2019t mean anything. That essay ends where the intro begins in a lot of ways.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been to Houston, but you write about it so beautifully in \u201cEcstasy\u201d that I feel like I\u2019ve already visited. Other than the rap music, which you cover in the essay, what books or movies or cultural objects could help explain Houston to someone who\u2019s never been there?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

Have you read Bryan Washington\u2019s short story collection Lot<\/em>? It\u2019s incredible. He\u2019s so good. But weirdly to me, it\u2019s the definitive work of Houston fiction. It\u2019s crazy that there hasn\u2019t been one before this, but there really, really hasn\u2019t. Houston has a strong literary tradition. Donald Barthelme was there for a long time, and the University of Houston has a great creative writing program. The city itself has an intense, weird, interesting feel to it. It\u2019s like LA. It\u2019s one of those places that\u2019s kind of horrible to visit unless you\u2019re embedded within one of the little pockets that make up what the city actually is. It can feel soulless. Soulless and expansive and forever. But it has this strange, dense heat to it culturally. The early 2000s was such a time in Houston\u2014there was the rap music, of course, but coinciding with this deeply national aesthetic, post 9\/11. Those things together, and my being sixteen at the time, were really intense for me.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s your favorite Houston rapper?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I always have to say UGK, even though they were technically from Port Arthur. But I think the Houston sound belongs to DJ Screw. I got into this hypnotic rhythm of listening to a lot of his old mixtapes while I was writing this book, and I found it so soothing. I would just clean my house and listen.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I was pleased to see The New Yorker<\/em> have to acknowledge DJ Screw.<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

Me, too. Also to have to acknowledge my drug use.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Who are your favorite writers? Whom do you return to often?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I have a lot of favorite writers, but I don\u2019t do the thing where someone is a touchstone for me and then I go to them for inspiration. Plenty of the writers I most admire, I read them once, and their work leaves a stamp on me, and I never return. I reread a ton, but only for pleasure. The best writer of my\/our generation\u2014I\u2019m presuming\u2014is Ocean Vuong. I think he\u2019s so fucking good. I taught a class on voice at Columbia this past semester. I assigned Ocean as well as some critics\u2014Ellen Willis, Greg Tate. When I reread something of theirs, it jolts me in this really pleasurable way. I also like the way Zadie Smith\u2019s and Rebecca Solnit\u2019s minds work. When Zadie Smith published her first essay collection, I was like, Oh, here\u2019s someone who argues, who writes very forcefully, who is completely aware of the fact that at any moment she could be completely wrong about everything she\u2019s saying. And you could feel that in her work. I found that really refreshing. It\u2019s the same with Rebecca Solnit\u2014just the capaciousness within some of her work, the feeling that she\u2019s walking through this ever-expanding field. When I love something a ton I tend not to reread it. I think Eula Biss is one of the best essayists, but On Immunity<\/em> left such an intense mark on me that I\u2019ve read it only once.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What do you think you\u2019ll tackle next?<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I was just talking to my agent about this last night. When I first moved to New York, there was some appetite for books about feminism by young women, and I was like, I absolutely don\u2019t want to write one of these\u2014and then I basically did. I like writing much more than I like having written. So writing a book was something I wanted to do just for the experience of it. Writing another book is not going to appeal to me until a specific idea comes. Right now, I couldn\u2019t possibly even want to.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You have an M.F.A in fiction, and you said in a recent interview with BookPage <\/em>that you might want to write a super weird novel at some point soon.<\/p>\n

TOLENTINO<\/p>\n

I wrote a novel before, and I shelved it. Like every journalist, I also definitely want to try to write a screenplay, because I don\u2019t know how, and it intrigues me to learn, and also, journalism is collapsing. Just kidding! I love writing fiction. I loved it, I loved it. I never thought I was particularly good at it, but I really loved it. With my current job, I can\u2019t come home and work on fiction. My brain just doesn\u2019t work like that. But I don\u2019t know \u2026 If I got fired tomorrow, I would probably go to the woods and try to write a novel.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Brian Ransom is a writer who lives in New York City. He is the assistant online editor at\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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